Plaxo re-focuses on the address book maintenance, are facing new competition-CNET (blog)

Plaxo personal assistant will monitor the public Web for updates on your contacts.(Credit: Plaxo)

This review has been updated throughout, now that I have had practical experience with the product's Plaxo personal assistant.

Some time after its launch back in 2002, contact list management app Plaxo lost its way. Management of the company, so that social networks as a wagon had to get on and done Plaxo to a personal social hub--which no one really needed. It was the second bad error Plaxo had done with his service, that they first be his habit of sending requests for updated information to the users ' contacts, was often taken for spam. Nobody could suffer Plaxos users, even if Plaxos kernel address book updating and multidevice synchronization features were quite useful.

Now company, a division of Comcast for the last three years, back to its roots as a contact updating and synchronization service, which is still a necessary function. If you have been given different and conflicting address books on the Internet, your e-mail app and your phone, so that you know the problem. The new Plaxo are also back on outbound e-mail messages, so you can use it without becoming a pariah. But it is with a lesser-known competitor, that performs a similar function for 100 percent less money.

Plaxo officially dumped redundant social network Portal today and launch a new service to automate address book maintenance for users. New Plaxo Personal Assistant takes your personal address book, and goes out to the public Internet to find updates information in it. Then synchronize data back to your existing address books (Outlook or Google) and devices (iPhones, and so forth).

Unlike Hiya (see review below), which uses white pages data to update the home addresses and phone numbers of your contacts, Plaxo user Zoom Info to update the company's contact information, as well as the businesses your contact works for, and their titles and work contact details. There are several business use, of course, than the white pages data. And after to have data updated automatically means you do not end up annoying contacts with impersonal impingements on their time. You get unlisted and private information, of course, but you'll keep your friends happy.

I was also not willing to experiment with Plaxos synchronization function to send its data back to my main contact list on our company's Exchange server. As is the case with many people I know, made my own address book from a collection of separate and fragile lists in different Exchange folders, plus some iPhone-only addresses. As I would like to collect all these lists, Smalley told me, I would would disable existing Exchange sync functionality on my phone and also install software on my PC to synchronize with Outlook directly to make Plaxo work, and we were not surethat all of my data would make the transition back to Exchange. I conclude my Plaxo account to a Gmail account, and the bi-directional synchronization was quick and precise.

Plaxos best features is not cheap. New Automatic Updates feature, Plaxo personal assistant, is $ 79.95 per year. The tool synchronization, Sync Plaxo Platinum, is also a paid service at $ 59.95 per year. You can get both for $ 120 per year (a savings of $ 1.66 a month if you count). Plaxo is a useful service, but these are high prices. A person who has worried enough about contact maintenance probably already paying for LinkedIn (starting at $ 239.40 a year) and, optionally, an email intelligence app like Xobni Plus ($ 95.88), both of which you are more likely to use daily.

Plaxo has a useful free feature, it is used to charge for a de-duper to get rid of dust gække letters of modern address books: the repeated contacts from contact list merges we from time to time, for example. When you move to a new mobile device. This tool works well, merge data correctly from the separate records, and always ask before you perform a mail merge, it may be sensible. De-duper is a central feature, where Plaxos focus on merge and synchronize contact lists from multiple sources (Outlook, Google, smartphones, etc.). Plaxo will collect your address books from all of your sources and merge them into an online address book (by Plaxo.com) free of charge, which is good for backup of your personal contacts list. But it is the paid services that make Plaxo really useful.

Hiya updates also contacts from public information – but it is free of charge.(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

If you do not want to, try this
There is a serious competitor to Plaxo, called Hiya. Like Plaxo, it will de-dupe your contacts, and update them automatically from public white pages data. Hiya I fed my iPhone address book, and it did a good job to find and merge duplicate contacts. It also enables personal (home) contact information, that I do not have in my address book. Hiya, however, do not know much about the contacts work information, that data is not in the phone books. In order to keep business contacts up to date, Plaxo Personal Assistant do a better job.

As with Plaxo, but resulted in an error in the system I will not be able to synchronize my changes back to my iPhone address book. In case I was Hiyas alert about enabling bi-directional synchronization would replace all of the photos in my iPhone address book (and by extension the contacts synchronized Exchange) with empty cells. There was not a feature I wanted.

Hiya does not work directly with Outlook or Exchange, but if you enable two-way sync to your iPhone, you can update your PC-based addresses indirectly. It will connect the Google contacts, though. If you request it, it will also email contacts requires updated contact information. Plaxo has taught us that people dislike receiving these e-mail messages.

A great advantage: Hiya is free of charge. I its iPhone app, too.

There is a great limitation in both Hiya and Plaxo: neither use Facebook or LinkedIn as a source for updating contact info. These social networks are the de facto white pages in today's Internet, so it is a pity that these utilities do not use them. I get to know in Facebook, it is because the service does not permit API calls to the address book (for once, Facebook is more private than it should be); Hiya representatives tell me this integration comes, however, Facebook.

Recommendations (updated)
Hiya is for people who want to keep updated with the personal information of their contacts in the address book, a good address book management utility. It's free, easy to use, and is doing a good job with de-duping and fill out the information. Plaxo is better for automatic update for business contact information, but you'll pay a lot for the service. Plaxo remains also go to the update service for users who primarily on Outlook. It is a pity neither service performs a full work, update information about both personal and work accurately.

Anyone with an older or complicated address book system should proceed with caution, but as neither system has perfected mechanism to synchronize the updated contact lists back to PC or telephone-based address books.

See also Soocial that Synchronize and de-duping.

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